Rewind
by Lavender Valentine
Summary: Her blurred image haunted my dreams. I didn’t know who she was, but I knew she was somebody important. IK


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**Disclaimer:** You know I don't own them; they belong to Rumiko Takahashi. I just borrow them for fun and return them when I'm finished.

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**Rewind**

Her blurred image haunted my dreams. I didn't know who she was, but I knew she was somebody important. Sometimes, in the darkest hours of the night, her face would appear in my memories, piercing my heart with long-forgotten resentment.

I didn't remember her name, but I remembered that she loved my husband, Inu-Yasha. For this, I hated her, for I knew that _he_ had not forgotten. He could still remember her perfect face and her perfect figure and her perfect love, and so her ghost lingered between the two of us. If I could have erased all of his memories of her, I'd have done so in a heartbeat.

She possessed the powers of a miko, Inu-Yasha had told me once. He didn't often answer my questions about her, and his face would draw into a closed mask of pain when I asked, but every once in a while he would relent. I almost wished he wouldn't say anything at all, for what little information he did reveal only served to increase my jealousy and resentment.

A miko – she was somebody special. No wonder she had meant so much to Inu-Yasha. As for me, I was just an ordinary woman, who ate and breathed and hurt and loved and wondered just who it was that her husband dreamed of at night.

As I bent to draw the evening's water, my reflection in the stream stared back at me, mocking me in my plain clothing. Flickers of a memory tugged at my mind, tendrils of thoughts that never became clear. _I used to wear something different_, I remembered, _because I used to be special. I was a girl who walked in a time that wasn't my own, and my arrows once held magic. My clothing reflected my unique place in the world._

I fingered the collar of my kimono. Inu-Yasha's face had been so tender and hesitant when he gave it to me, telling me in his rough voice that he'd noticed my clothing had worn thin. Understanding that this was an expression of the hanyou's love – something he still had trouble putting into actual words – I accepted the gift and treasured the thought behind it.

Unfortunately, as much as I loved the kimono, I still had trouble moving around in it. I'd obviously spent most of my life wearing something far less restrictive, and it took time to undo the years of habitually walking with a long stride. This was the thought I consoled myself with after I tripped and fell headlong into the rough dirt. As an added insult, the bucket of water had spilled, soaking me to the skin. Frustrated, I cursed loudly enough to scare a nearby bird into flight from the branches.

I felt a brief rush of shame for allowing such uncouth words to fall from my lips. Inu-Yasha's constant stream of profanities was lending coarseness to my own language. Unwittingly, the comparison once again popped into my mind. _She_ certainly wouldn't utter such foul things, would she? Not _her_, not the perfect priestess.

Why couldn't I stop thinking about her? This I did remember - we were never friends. We'd been uneasy rivals with a shared enemy, both of us determined to fulfill our duties. We were two women out of time, neither of us belonging to the world we inhabited. Our commonality was a silver-haired hanyou with a bad temper, which probably reflected more on our poor taste in men than any shared personality traits. But I knew that like me, she had loved Inu-Yasha in spite of his arrogance and grumpy attitude and his absolutely annoying tendency to chew with his mouth open. And like me, she must have walked this land knowing that the half-demon would die to protect her.

Back to _her_ again – would she never leave my thoughts?

Sometimes my dreams showed me pictures of a battlefield, and she was standing in the middle of it. If I tried, I could bring back the stench of the decaying corpses, the moaning of the wounded, the sightless gaze of our dead allies. Most of all, the dreams would stir a remembrance of seeing Inu-Yasha and her in a tight embrace. When that happened, I would awaken with a sharp cry, searching in the dark for my husband's familiar form. He was still here, I would reassure myself; he was still with me. He wasn't with _her_.

The dreams seemed too fantastic to be real, but Inu-Yasha never contradicted my handful of memories. When I asked him what became of the other girl, he merely told me she was gone and refused to elaborate. This left me to wonder, though…if she had stayed, would he be with her instead? Would Inu-Yasha and I still have a life together?

She made a wish, Inu-Yasha once told me as he held my shaking form. My dreams that night had been horrific, filled with visions of death and great evil. I didn't need to be afraid, my husband had soothed, for her pure wish had removed the source of the evil's power. Her wish had saved all of us, and her wish had made it so Inu-Yasha and I could be together.

I pretended to fall back into sleep that night, but my mind could not settle. He meant to bring comfort with his words, but instead he revived another memory. _I_ once held that jewel. Should I have been the one to make that wish?

Would my wish have been as pure, even if making that wish would have meant that Inu-Yasha would have been with her instead? My soul pricked at me with this thought. I wanted to believe that I would have done the same as her, but I knew that I could never be so unselfish. I have spent far too many nights with Inu-Yasha, where I ran my hands along the smooth muscles of his back and enjoyed the feel of him as he breathed out a broken version of my name. I could never let him go.

I couldn't begin to describe how much it bothered me to be faced with my own impurities. _You and your perfect wish_, I snorted in the direction of the absent woman as I brushed the dirt from my knees and picked up the water bucket. _Now I have to spend the rest of my life knowing how much better you are than me. Just give me one more reason not to like you, why don't you?_

Crashing noises in the underbrush brought me out of my wandering thoughts. Berating myself for allowing my guard to drop while I was alone and unprotected, I grabbed my bow and aimed toward the thicket. A wild boar charged out, heading straight toward me. Before I could release my arrow, however, a red and white blur dashed between us. Sharp claws flashed, and then the boar was dead.

"Inu-Yasha!" I yelled, appalled at how close I'd come to hurting him. A sudden memory of his body pinned to a tree with an arrow flashed before my eyes and sickened me. Had that really happened? "What do you think you're doing? I almost shot you!"

He looked startled by my outburst, for I rarely lost my temper these days, but he chose to ignore it. "Guess we're having pig for dinner," Inu-Yasha grunted instead as he stooped to inspect his kill. "Do I need to get some water for cooking, or are we just gonna wring it out of your clothes?"

I flushed, tugging at my soaked clothing, but I was not about to let his teasing distract me from the memory of an arrow through his heart. "I would have _hurt_ you," I gasped. "Inu-Yasha, I don't _ever_ want to hurt you!"

His face tightened with that familiar closed expression. "Forget it," he said tersely. Silently, he refilled the bucket from the stream and handed it to me. "Come on," he said as he slung the boar over his shoulder. "It's getting late and I'm hungry. Besides, it's starting to rain."

I followed him along the path, at a loss as to what to say. Someone had pinned him to a tree...and my memories told me that _she_ had something to do with it. I knew better than to ask, though. His shoulders were stiff and his ears were flattened against his head, his entire posture telling me to leave the subject alone.

The falling rain provided a momentary distraction. "Thank you for fixing the leak in the roof of our hut," I told Inu-Yasha, allowing my hand to curl around his forearm. "You take very good care of me."

"That's what I do," he replied gruffly, but I could feel some of the tension leave his body. He brushed a droplet of rain from my forehead. "I'll always take care of you."

We entered the hut, grateful for its shelter from the elements. We'd been forced to leave the last few villages in which we'd settled, chased out by those who despised Inu-Yasha for his youkai blood and hated me for taking a hanyou as a husband. "At least this village seems to be more accepting of us than most," I said, thinking aloud. "The area has been plagued with youkai attacks; I'm sure they're happy to have your help."

"Let's just hope they have the same attitude after the youkai are gone," Inu-Yasha said bitterly. "The minute we stop being useful, they'll probably decide that one hanyou living near the village is too many, and we'll be back to living in the forests. You deserve a better life than this."

He fell to the task of skinning the boar, and our tiny room became quiet. Instead of enjoying the peace, though, my previous thoughts returned to plague me. There were so many things I just couldn't remember, and what memories I did have seldom made sense.

"Inu-Yasha," I said as I lit the fire, trying to think of a topic that might get me an answer other than 'it doesn't matter, it's in the past.' "Did I ever have a family?"

"Of course you had a family. Everyone comes from a family," Inu-Yasha pointed out, continuing to skin the boar as he spoke. He finished the job and handed me the prepared meat. "Do you wanna hear about them?" he asked, sitting beside me as I leaned over the cooking fire.

"Later, perhaps," I answered. "Whenever you tell me these stories, it always sounds like something that happened to someone else. Shippo, Miroku, Sango…I don't remember any of them." _Except for her_, I added silently. _I remember the girl you loved._

"I guess that's for the best, then," Inu-Yasha sighed. "You can't miss what you don't remember, and that includes your family." He studied my face for a moment. "What's really bothering you? You looked like you were gonna be sick when I killed that boar."

It took a long time for me to work up the courage to answer. He must have given up, because when I finally spoke, it startled him. "I saw you pinned by an arrow to a tree," I said quietly. "I know it really happened, so don't try to tell me I'm imagining it."

My husband gathered me into his arms. "Look, that was in the past, and – "

"And it doesn't matter, I know," I said harshly, struggling to get away from him. "But it _does_ matter, Inu-Yasha, because I know that _she_ has something to do with it!"

"So what? It still doesn't matter. She's gone, and I ain't pinned to that tree anymore, now am I?" he asked, refusing to let me go.

His claws scraped lightly against my arms and I shivered. Those sharp talons – I knew that I'd once feared them, but now they caused an entirely different sensation when they danced across my skin. As we sat there by the fire, each lost in thought, I toyed with Inu-Yasha's claws and tried to suppress the fresh onslaught of jealousy forming in my gut. I just knew that those claws had once touched _her_ in a loving manner, too. _She_ had once been in his arms; _she_ had once felt the brush of his lips.

"I try to answer your questions, 'cause I know you don't remember any of it," Inu-Yasha said softly, disturbing my inner turmoil. "But dammit, it's _hard_. It _hurts_. This story – it's about betrayal and deception and a hundred other things I wish hadn't happened, and you're better off because you _don't_ remember."

"I remember enough to know that you'd rather be with her." The bitter words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. Horrified, I cringed as Inu-Yasha stiffened and moved away from me. "I didn't mean – " I began.

"Yes, you did." Inu-Yasha placed some more wood on the fire, sneezing a couple of times as the smoke wafted into his sensitive nose. "What in the hells do you want from me? I'm living here in a human settlement even though I hate it, because I'm trying to make some sort of life for us, and in case you haven't noticed, I'm here with _you_! What makes you think I wish it was _her_?"

"Because you loved her!" I cried. I hated how petulant my voice sounded, like that of an over-indulged child, but I was too far into this to stop. "You loved her, with her perfect ideals and her perfect pure heart!"

"Now you're really being stupid," Inu-Yasha said flatly. "She wasn't perfect – far from it."

"But she gave you something I can never offer!" I said. "I could never compare to her! I can never give you what _she_ gave you, and I hate her for it! And I hate myself even more because I should be falling to the ground and _thanking_ her everyday instead of hating her!"

Horrified, I realized that I had actually given voice to the confused, twisted thoughts inside my head. Resentment and jealousy had overcome my good sense, and I'd never be able to take back my angry words. Head bowed, I waited for Inu-Yasha's wrath to rain down upon me.

When he did speak, his voice was controlled. This bothered me even more, because I knew how angry he had to be to get to that point. "You are the biggest _idiot_," he ground out, reaching over to shake me roughly by the shoulders. "Do you have any idea what her wish was?"

"You told me, didn't you? I'm _living_ her wish! I'm here because she wished for us to be together! She made an unselfish wish, and she'll always be first in your heart because of it!"

"Her wish was for us to have a chance at a life together, but that wish sure as hell wasn't _perfect_!" Inu-Yasha snapped. "She left me as a hanyou, which takes any chance at us having a normal life and shoots it in the ass! And she altered your memories, so you don't even remember why you should hate me!"

"Hate you?" I was stunned. "Inu-Yasha, how could I? Nothing you've ever told me about has made me think I should hate you, so what haven't you told me?"

"I promised to protect you," he whispered, his head hung down. I could no longer see his amber eyes; they were hidden by the silver bangs. "I promised to protect _both _of you, and I failed. You were hurt so many times…and then you'd see me with her and it would hurt you even more."

He spun away from me and turned to face the fire. "To make it worse, I'm a selfish bastard who's _glad_ you can't remember how badly you were hurt because of me," Inu-Yasha muttered. "Some husband you got."

"Do you still love her?" I hated asking the question, but something inside of me just had to know.

For a moment, I thought he might refuse to answer. "Of course I do," Inu-Yasha answered reluctantly. "There's a part of me that will _always_ love her. I can't help it, and I'm sorry. I can't just shove her memory away as if she never existed."

I had wanted an honest answer, and I had been given one. That didn't make it any less painful to hear. I blinked back the tears that were forming behind my eyes, knowing how much Inu-Yasha hated to see a woman cry. If he could make it through this conversation without running away, then the least I could do was grant him my composure.

A calloused thumb caught the stray tear before it could fall. "It doesn't mean that I don't love _you_," Inu-Yasha said in a husky voice. He drew me against him, cradling me in his arms.

He had pressed my face into his chest and was holding me tightly, as if I might disappear if he let go. I slid my arms around his waist and felt a few more tears escape. "How can you love the both of us?" I asked, my voice muffled by the fabric of his fire-rat robes.

"I don't know; I just do," Inu-Yasha answered helplessly. He rubbed his cheek against my hair and placed his warm lips against my temple. "It used to upset her, just like it upsets you. In the end, though…she said she just wanted me to be happy."

"But wouldn't you have been happy with _her_?"

"Yeah," Inu-Yasha whispered. "I would have been happy with her, but I'm not _unhappy_ just because I'm here with you."

Inu-Yasha never was very good at speaking his feelings, so he tried to show me instead. He nuzzled his face into my neck and gave a low growl, a sound he knew would make my knees shake. Every touch of his lips was his way of telling me that he loved me, and I responded in kind. We melted into each other, and likely would have foregone our dinner entirely were it not for a large cloud of smoke filling the hut.

"Goodness, Inu-Yasha, what did you put on that fire?" I coughed as I doused the smoldering pit.

The poor hanyou had his head out the window, gasping for air in spite of the torrential downpour falling on his head. "Must have been a green twig in the bunch," he said as he hacked the smoke from his lungs. He drew his head inside.

The heavy rain had completely wet his hair, leaving the silver locks hanging in shaggy ropes. Both of his ears were pinned back against his head, the fuzz behind them sticking straight up. He shook the water off of himself, reminding me even more of a dog who'd been left outside too long. I couldn't help it, the sight made the corner of my mouth turn upward.

"Are you _laughing_ at me?" His face was set in its customary scowl, but the twitch of his ear told me he wasn't angry.

"Never," I smiled, reaching over to gently tweak a soft ear. "Inu-Yasha," I murmured as I twined a damp strand around my fingers. My head was spinning, still trying to make sense of our conversation. "You really haven't answered my question. Why should I hate you?"

His eyes closed in pain. "I'm a worthless hanyou who can't even protect you properly half the time, much less provide a decent life for you. That wish…you don't even remember why it's wrong to love me." His shoulders slumped. "I should be spending my life with you as a human. We won't even grow old together."

"You'll stay with me anyway, won't you? Even though I'll be old?" I asked. He gave me a look that clearly questioned my intelligence for asking. "Of course you will," I said with satisfaction. "You'll stay by my side and care for me as long as I live, because you love me. That makes me happy, and if having all of my memories restored would change how I feel about that, then you're right – it's better that I don't remember." I rested my head against his arm. "For what it's worth, Inu-Yasha, I do remember that I've loved you for a long time."

"I just want you to be happy." Inu-Yasha shifted, moving me closer to him. Golden eyes softened as he traced the curve of my cheek with the dull side of his claw. "It's been a long time since I've heard you laugh," he said. "I can't remember the last time your smile went all the way to your eyes."

"It's been a long time since I felt like I _could_ laugh," I confessed. My fingers found their way into his thick hair, running through the wet tangles and smoothing it. Gathering a fistful of the silver locks, I drew Inu-Yasha's head down to mine and kissed him thoroughly. Not a youkai, nor a man – he was hanyou, and it was my privilege to love him.

"Lady Kikyo, we need you – oh, excuse me!" Keiko, a young woman from the village, had come searching for me. She had dashed through the doorway and was now dripping water all over the floor. "I'm sorry to interrupt," she said, her cheeks stained pink with embarrassment, "but my elder sister's birth-pains have started. The midwife says that you know about such things - will you give us your assistance?"

Inu-Yasha reluctantly released me from his embrace. "Go on," he said, taking note of my surprise. "Don't act so shocked – you still know how to take care of people, don't ya? Though it's damn inconvenient, having some whelp come in this kind of weather."

"I'm sure the child's mother isn't thrilled with the timing of this, either," I said wryly, planting a kiss on his forehead. I had located my herb kit and was checking the contents when I felt a warm cloth settle across my shoulders. Inu-Yasha had removed his fire-rat haori and was wrapping me inside it.

"Don't want you getting sick," he said, tucking the ends of the sleeves into a loose knot. "You humans are always so fragile."

"I love you, too, Inu-Yasha," I said, reading the message hidden in his gruff words. With a smile, I raced off into the rain with Keiko.

Many hours later, I returned to our hut. The seeminglyrelentless rain had ended, and the clouds had parted to reveal a waning moon. It was still too early in the morning for the sun to begin its ascent; even the chickens were at rest.

Inu-Yasha was lying on our futon, sleeping lightly. He opened one tawny eye as I entered the hut, then wrinkled his nose. "Lots of blood," he muttered.

"Childbirth is a messy business," I reminded him with a yawn. I stripped off my clothing and bundled it away from his sensitive nose. "Move over, you're taking up my side."

He gave me just enough room to slide into the bedding before curling his warm body around me. "S'long as it's not your blood," he said sleepily. "I can't stand to see you hurt."

"Sometimes a little blood is a good thing," I said, thinking of the healthy baby I'd helped deliver.

There was no answer from my hanyou. His even breathing told me he'd fallen back into slumber. I slid closer to him and delighted in the way he carelessly threw his arm across my waist.

_I just want you to be happy,_ Inu-Yasha had told me. It was a thought to cherish as sleep approached.

A short time later, just as I was nodding off, another thought came. _She_ wanted _him_ to be happy. And if that were true, then she must have known that Inu-Yasha would find happiness with _me_. And if she took away my memories filled with hate and anger, she must have wanted me to be happy as well.

Understanding came to me then, and with it, all of my jealousy toward the other girl seemed to evaporate. The woman I believed to be my rival had understood what I had not – that Inu-Yasha's heart was not divided into small pieces, but rather magnified to encompass the both of us. And with that comforting thought, I fell into a peaceful slumber that I probably didn't deserve, but certainly cherished.

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**A/N:** I wanted to write a happy ending involving these two. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because that's a scenario I seldom find.

Many thanks to TitianWren, especially since she had to beta this twice. You're the greatest, Tish.


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